Wide-field multi-object spectroscopy with MANIFEST

Abstract

MANIFEST is a multi-object fibre facility for the Giant Magellan Telescope that uses 'Starbug' robots to accurately position fibre units across the telescope's focal plane. MANIFEST, when coupled to the telescope's planned seeinglimited instruments, offers access to larger fields of view; higher multiplex gains; versatile focal plane reformatting of the focal plane via integral-field-units; image-slicers; and in some cases higher spatial and spectral resolution. The TAIPAN instrument on the UK Schmidt Telescope is now close to science verification which will demonstrate the feasibility of the Starbug concept. We are now moving into the conceptual development phase for MANIFEST, with a focus on developing interfaces for the telescope and for the instruments.

OzDES multi-object fibre spectroscopy for the Dark Energy Survey: results and second data release

“…The median values for the X and C regions include X3 and C3, which were the highest priority fields, so we list the median values for the C3 and X3 separately as well. For the E region fields and X3 and C3, the median is close to the 25 epochs that were used in the simulations of the OzDES RM programme in King et al (2015).…”

“…With this number of epochs, simulations in King et al (2015) predict that one should recover lags for 35-45% of Figure 12. The position, with respect to the centre of the 2dF field plates, of LRGs with redshifts (left plot) and without redshifts (right plot).…”

“…OzDES also continued into a sixth year, but was no longer targeting transients. Instead, OzDES continued with its programme to monitor AGN (King et al 2015;Hoormann et al 2019) and to obtain redshifts of galaxies that hosted transients in earlier years. DES continued to target the 10 DES supernova fields during Y6, but with a reduced frequency of about once a month.…”

“…The first year of the OzDES RM programme was used to define the sample that was followed in the subsequent five years. Details of the selection are provided in King et al (2015). In brief, AGN were selected on the basis of the quality of the spectra that were taken in Y1, on the presence of emission lines, while avoiding AGN that occasionally fell in chip gaps, maximising the number of AGN with two reverberating spectral lines in our wavelength range, and ensuring that the AGN selected sampled the redshift interval 0 < z < 4.…”

Overview and status of the Giant Magellan Telescope project

“…We will not report on all of these instruments in this overview as they are covered in other reports in these proceedings. 27,28,29,30,31 The G-CLEF (GMT-Consortium Large Earth Finder) high-resolution optical spectrograph is the most mature GMT instrument at this time. 27 This instrument is being developed by a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics with collaborators at several other institutions.…”